Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Beliefs Manifest Reality


About the Book
We must begin to see our minds as organs of action, our acts as thoughts. -Rolf Gates

A good friend of mine who is a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine has a story he likes to tell about the power of intention. During his training he was taught that intention was a key element of the treatment. The same techniques could be used with vastly different results depending on what the practitioner believed was going to happen. To illustrate this point, they tied a ring to the end of a short string, creating a pendulum. Students were first instructed to hold their hand as steady as possible so that the pendulum would not swing. Most had no trouble. They were then told to again hold their hand as steady as possible, but to imagine the ring would swing. In every case, though they tried as hard as they could to hold the pendulum still, once they began to envision that it would move, they could not stop it from swinging back and forth.

Something I really like about this story is that it shows that intention is often what we believe, not the actions we take. Though the students were making every effort to keep the ring motionless, their belief that it would move created an intention that manifested to reality.

In the same way, I have often observed with my students that it is their belief about what will happen that determines if their actions have power or not. Often timid students will at first be unable to complete seemingly simple tasks such as asking their horse to back away from them. Though they will be making a gesture that is technically correct, they don't believe they actually have the ability to get the horse to move. The horse feels this lack of intention and makes it into a reality, keeping his feet planted.

I also have had students who create unwanted behaviors in their horses because they believe they will find them. They will think their horse is spooky, so he is spooky, or they are afraid he will constantly push into their space, and he does.

At the rescue we had a particularly energetic and friendly mule named Pistol. Pistol was the first to the fence, the first to mug you for treats after you entered the paddock, and the last to believe you actually didn't have anything for him. Many of the volunteers had a terrible time with him. They complained that he was so pushy that they couldn't even get into the paddock to do anything with any of the other horses.

Conversely, I could give Pistol a single look that said "It's not your turn right now," and he would keep his distance without having to be asked again. My intention didn't change his character, his training, or his attitude, but it did create a totally different dynamic between us. I could show the volunteers technique after technique for persistently moving him off but some could not get it to work for them. Fundamentally, we had different beliefs about the situation and those beliefs manifested totally opposite realities.

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Stillness in Motion
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Releasing Fear, Unleashing Genius

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